Meta-learning for malaria diagnosis: evaluating stacking models for enhanced classification performance

Abstract

Accurate malaria detection is crucial for effective disease management, particularly in regions with limited medical resources. Deep learning models have shown promising results in automated diagnosis, yet real-world deployment often faces challenges such as computational cost and model interpretability. This study evaluates multiple deep learning architectures—VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121—on the publicly available National Institutes of Health (NIH) malaria cell image dataset (27,558 images), and enhances their performance using stacking ensemble learning with different meta-learners. Among individual models, DenseNet121 achieved the highest accuracy of 88.00%, while MobileNetV2 had the lowest at 84.80%. Implementing stacking with logistic regression as the meta-learner improved accuracy to 89.40%, while random forest increased it to 90.10%. The best performance was achieved with XGBoost as the meta-learner, attaining an accuracy of 91.20%, precision of 92.10%, recall of 90.80%, and an F1-score of 91.40%—representing a 3.2% accuracy improvement over the best individual model. The classification report further confirms superior performance in distinguishing infected and uninfected cases. These results highlight the potential of stacking with advanced meta-learners to support health workers in rapid, reliable malaria diagnosis, ultimately aiding timely treatment, and improving patient outcomes in clinical and field settings.